WATCH

Is it possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems, improve the lives of people trapped in poverty, and sequester carbon naturally? John D. Liu has proven that it is. His film, “Hope in a Changing Climate,” showcases approaches that have worked on the Loess Plateau in China, Ethiopia and Rwanda. Produced in collaboration with the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP). http://sco.lt/7sy3CT

Few places on earth harbor as much biodiversity as the Yasuni Biosphere Reserve, a 6,500-square-mile territory in eastern Ecuador where the Amazon basin ascends into the Andes Mountains. But Yasuni also sits atop vast reserves of oil, and this rainforest wilderness, home to the indigenous Waorani people, faces intense development pressure.
In this Yale Environment 360 video, filmmaker Ryan Killackey travels into the heart of Yasuni with seven scientists and chronicles their work as they inventory the reserve’s remarkable birds, fish, animals, and plants. Through their work, the researchers hope to bolster international initiatives to preserve a large swath of this threatened land….

Water in the Anthropocene is a 3-minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle.Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene.Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways

If we want to manage the world for future generations, we need to define what kind of world that should be. Credit: NASA

ACHIEVING A MORE SUSTAINABLE world presupposes a worldview that considers well-being not only in terms of income, but also in terms of human security and opportunities for every person to thrive. It is worth considering what the world would look like from such a perspective.

For starters, it would be a world in which people live free from conflict over land, water, and space; and that ensures food security for the 739 million people who are hungry or malnourished today. Such a world would preserve the 20,000 species of animals and plants that face extinction, understanding their power to heal us physically and spiritually. It would draw us back from the brink of unstoppable global warming and its consequences for coastal communities, weather patterns, and, in some regions, habitability. It would protect sites of extraordinary natural beauty and inspiration. And, for future generations, it would be a world that is more sustainable than ours…. Think globally, act globally – Opinion – ABC Environment Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The archeological record indicates that civilizational collapse does not come suddenly out of the blue. Archeologists analyzing earlier civilizations talk about a decline-and-collapse scenario. Economic and social collapse was almost always preceded by a period of environmental decline….

“No previous civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports. Nor will ours. Yet economists look at the future through a different lens. Relying heavily on economic data to measure progress, they see the near 10-fold growth in the world economy since 1950 and the associated gains in living standards as the crowning achievement of our modern civilization….More….Two Views of Our Future: Science Versus Mainstream Economics : TreeHugger.

Get Ready for the Ride of Your Life

Given that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years for evolution to build diversity back up to pre-crash levels after major extinction episodes, increased rates of extinction are of particular concern, especially because global and regional diversity today is generally lower than it was 20,000 years ago as a result of the last planetary state shift. … Possible too are substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population. … Although the ultimate effects of changing biodiversity and species compositions are still unknown, if critical thresholds of diminishing returns in ecosystem services were reached over large areas and at the same time global demands increased … widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result

Whee!

How close are we to such a global state shift? One way to conceptualize it is to visualize the percentage of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems that have seen local state shifts: